🐈 cat's notes 📓

[cat]

June update

French

I’m currently at 119 hours for the year which means I added 36 hours in the month of June. You can see the hour break down below.

Month

Year

I missed two days of French, which for me is defined as not getting at least an hour. In both cases I was just so tired after getting home from the day that I couldn’t focus in any meaningful way on French so while I’m sure I could have put something on, it would have been in one ear and out the other, which isn’t meaningful input in my book. Neither day I did zero French however, as I always try to get some in the morning and some in the evening.

Anki stuff

I’m starting to feel a bit overwhelmed by the Refold deck, a lot of leeches building up. I have less than 150 new cards remaining though, and with 10 new cards a day I may just stick it out. There’s something psychologically nice about being done with new cards even if my reviews suck for awhile

I have 128 young and 162 mature words in my custom deck mined from reading/watching. I have 376 in young and 494 in mature in the Refold deck.

I also have an ear training deck made from youtube videos mentioned before - it’s going fine. I also added gender decks and have added emojis along with the color to reinforce the gender of the word in my brain. I went with cowboys for masculine and ghosts for feminine.

Kwiziq

I’ve continued with Kwiziq after my late start on it, although not every day. Here’s a pic of my ‘brain map’ as they call it:

The red one is conjugating ‘devoir’.

Things I stopped

I cancelled Clozemaster and haven’t really been using Linguno much. I also stopped using Tex’s French Grammar as much as it overlaps a lot with Kwiziq.

Things I started or switched up

I recently started pronunciation training and some of what I’ll call guided output (Pimsleur haha). I struggle with the French R despite looking at the diagrams and practicing, but it seems like something that I’ll just have to keep working on and eventually it will come. English speakers struggling with the French R is hardly a secret, but I do aim to not sound horrible to natives so I’m trying.
I’m currently on lesson 4 of level 1 in Pimsleur, so it’s a lot of known material and I’m breaking from the program a bit by planning to do 2-3 lessons a day if my schedule allows.

I’m nearly done with Alice Ayel’s courses. I skipped out on the Teen course halfway through because it was killing my motivation a bit to do so much dictation, but I’m finding the graded readers incredibly helpful and the ‘adult’ course which was all about French history I enjoyed. I’m taking a breather before starting her ‘senior’ courses as I feel like I’d benefit from reading more of the ‘adult’ graded readers.

I’ve added in a lot of InnerFrench podcasts which I follow along with the transcript. I initially thought they were too hard for me until I saw someone comment on Reddit that you should start from the beginning as they get harder over the series. It’s true! I’m currently 15 episodes in and able to follow along pretty easily with maybe ~5 word look ups per 30 min episode, and I’ve started speeding up the audio to 1.2x. Here is an extract from a transcript I recently listened to:

La septième étape de l’histoire, c’est justement l’épreuve finale. Après toutes les difficultés qu’a dû affronter le héros, il se retrouve face à la dernière épreuve, l’épreuve finale, qui est généralement la plus difficile. Ça peut être un combat contre le grand méchant, ou ça peut être de sauver une princesse face à un dragon. Bref, cette étape est extrêmement difficile pour le héros et, à ce moment-là, il passe très près de la mort. Ça c’est la huitième étape, quand le héros est proche de la mort. Vous savez quand on regarde un film, c’est le moment le plus stressant parce qu’on a très envie que le héros réussisse mais le combat est tellement difficile que le héros est sur le point de perdre.
Mais heureusement, et ça c’est l’étape 9, le héros réussit cette dernière épreuve. Il gagne ce dernier combat et il prouve qu’il est bien un héros.

(source)

I would say this is a comfortable level of French for me right now. I’m not struggling but I look up a word here or there and I have no trouble at all following the gist of each podcast. I’d say easily in the 90% comprehension range.

I definitely don’t feel like my French has progressed at a very rapid clip compared to May, but I did a lot fewer hours and I no longer have the impressive A0 gains I’d like to get closer to 50-60 hours a month going forward, but we’ll see how that shakes out with my schedule and mental energy.

---

Japanese

For Japanese I’m at 3941 pages out of my yearly 5k page minimum and 83 hours out of my 125 hour audiobook only goal.

I have 59 young and 395 mature in the names deck. 40 remain suspended.

I have been inconsistent in having tutoring sessions and kind of fell off my other forms of output and I feel how creaky I am talking now. I can still do it but ugh, the searching for words is rough. It’s been a busy time for me, so balancing work, travel, Japanese maintenance, and fairly aggressive French study has been hard.